Before we jump into the variety of string functions offered in PHP it is important that we understand how strings are handled. We will need to examine the use of different quoting methods and the advantages and disadvantages of each. We will also cover the topic of concatenating strings together. The topics covered in this section are vital to the rest of this tutorial and, in turn, the rest of your programming career. The techniques discussed will be seen over and over again throughout the course of time and will be utilized in just about any PHP application you may develop. First, we will take a high level overview of each topic in this section.
Single quotes -The simplest method for quoting strings, this method is also the most efficient.
Double quotes -While not quite as efficient as single quotes, using double quotes allows for variable substitution and some simple formatting commands.
Heredoc -This not so common method can be used when you don't want to worry about escaping special characters. It also allows for variable substitution.
Concatenation -We will discuss combining strings and the most efficient methods for doing so.
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